Janel George at the American Bar Association on Critical Race Theory:

CRT is not a diversity and inclusion “training” but a practice of interrogating the role of race and racism in society that emerged in the legal academy and spread to other fields of scholarship. [ Kimberlé ] Crenshaw—who coined the term “CRT”—notes that CRT is not a noun, but a verb. It cannot be confined to a static and narrow definition but is considered to be an evolving and malleable practice. It critiques how the social construction of race and institutionalized racism perpetuate a racial caste system that relegates people of color to the bottom tiers. CRT also recognizes that race intersects with other identities, including sexuality, gender identity, and others*. CRT recognizes that racism is not a bygone relic of the past. Instead, it acknowledges that the legacy of slavery, segregation, and the imposition of second-class citizenship on Black Americans and other people of color continue to permeate the social fabric of this nation. 

*Note the non-mention of sex. Trans people and LGB people count but women don’t. Janel George is a woman but left women out.

That aside – again I ask – is this so crazy? There’s been some progress, but it’s far from complete. Is that a hideously woke thing to say? There are statistics that back it up – on health, education, income, wealth, incarceration, debt – basic stuff like that.

Some “key tenets”:

• Acknowledgement that racism is a normal feature of society and is embedded within systems and institutions, like the legal system, that replicate racial inequality. This dismisses the idea that racist incidents are aberrations but instead are manifestations of structural and systemic racism.

• Rejection of popular understandings about racism, such as arguments that confine racism to a few “bad apples.” CRT recognizes that racism is codified in law, embedded in structures, and woven into public policy. CRT rejects claims of meritocracy or “colorblindness.” CRT recognizes that it is the systemic nature of racism that bears primary responsibility for reproducing racial inequality.

I’m guessing that’s where the conservatives ask to get off the bus. I’m guessing they’d rather think it’s individual Sin as opposed to socially embedded. I think that’s just fatuous. How could we possibly think it’s not embedded? Unless we live in the world with bags over our heads.

• Recognition of the relevance of people’s everyday lives to scholarship. This includes embracing the lived experiences of people of color, including those preserved through storytelling, and rejecting deficit-informed research that excludes the epistemologies of people of color.

Ok that sounds like an opening to bullshit. If the idea is that storytelling should trump research, then no.

It could be a mixed bag – some reasonable claims and some groupthinky faddish crap.

Why conservatives are so freaked out about Critical Race Theory, or what they say is Critical Race Theory.

Critical race theory is an academic concept, a form of analysis developed in the 1970s and ’80s by legal scholars including Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw. It suggests that our nation’s history of race and racism is embedded in law and public policy, still plays a role in shaping outcomes for Black Americans and other people of color, and should be taken into account when these issues are discussed.

Is any of that especially wack or even surprising?

According to Christopher F. Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and perhaps the foremost popularizer of critical race theory alarmism on the right, CRT “prescribes a revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.” Supposedly, under the auspices of CRT, children are being taught Aztec chants whose “clear implication” is “the displacement of the Christian god.” Critical race theory has been purposely mischaracterized as a divisive form of discourse that pits people of color against White people, that reduces children to their race.

I think maybe people who don’t live it are easily lulled into thinking it was all solved years ago and there’s really nothing much left to do, apart from imprisoning ever more “super-predators.”

But maybe CRT is all a crock. But I still don’t know exactly what kind of crock.

That was the goal, after all.

Low-income immigrants in the US who struggled to afford basic needs during the coronavirus pandemic avoided seeking government benefits and other assistance because of immigration-related concerns, according to a new report by the Urban Institute.

Of course they did, and that’s exactly what Trump and his goons wanted them to do. Cunning plan succeeded.

Immigrants, and especially immigrant women, have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic-induced recession, enduring higher unemployment rates than workers born in the United States, the Migration Policy Institute reports.

While the economy sputtered, more than a quarter of adults in low-income immigrant families said they or their partner lost a job, the Urban Institute found. Roughly half said the pandemic had negatively affected their family’s employment, whether through layoffs, furloughs, lost income or other threats to their livelihoods.

…

But, even as low-income immigrant families worried about meeting their needs, a sizable chunk – 27.5% – decided against using non-cash government benefits or other help because of immigration-related concerns. They didn’t apply for or stopped participating in nutrition, health and housing programs, which could have provided the life-sustaining basics they needed.

That’s what Trump wanted to happen. He wanted them to go without and be afraid.

The British Journal of Medicine.

Yes, the British Journal of Medicine.

MEDICINE.

Interesting.

If it has the word “critical” in it, it must be dangerous, is that the idea?

Across the United States, state legislatures are showing a newfound interest in — and aversion to — critical race theory, or CRT, an academic movement that systematically considers how even seemingly neutral laws, regulations and social norms can have different impacts on particular racial and ethnic groups. It examines how legislatures at times target racial minorities for adverse treatment — such as recent voter suppression laws in Arizona, Georgia and Iowa — and, at other times, are simply indifferent to how new laws will impact those outside the majority.

And this should be stamped out because…why, exactly?

CRT originated in U.S. law schools in the 1970s and remains well established and widely accepted there. But in recent weeks, some Republican-dominated state legislatures have adopted laws that ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools. Some, such as the laws in Idaho and Oklahoma, even restrict the use of CRT in public colleges and universities. Other states, including Georgia and Utah, are actively considering similar legislation or administrative action. A bill has even been introduced in the U.S. House (where the Democratic majority presumably will reject it).

I can easily believe there’s some work that Identifies As CRT that is shite, but that doesn’t mean all CRT is shite, and it seems most unlikely that it is. Given US history it seems all but impossible that it is.

Education Week has an explainer on what CRT is:

Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that racism is a social construct, and that it is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.

So the opponents think…what? That racism is not embedded in legal systems and policies [in the US]? How could that possibly be in a country built on slavery? Race-based slavery?

I suppose that is what they think. That was then, this is now, racism is ancient history. We had the Civil War, and Martin Luther King, and…and Martin Luther King and what more do these people want? Meanwhile the prison stats sit on a shelf somewhere.

Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT thus puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.

In other words the people angry about CRT are focusing on “I am not a racist!!!” when the point is that it’s not about you, it’s about what racism has embedded in our laws and practices so deeply that we don’t even see it.

Oh yay, more gentle reminders! I love gentle reminders!!

…………………………………….Wut?

That’s not a reminder, it’s wholly new information, and it’s word salad.

It goes on and on like that.

It’s stupid, it’s boring, it’s incoherent. (And how do you “fall in any kind of umbrella”?)

Meanwhile, glaciers are melting and sea levels are rising and forests are vanishing while people spin out the doctrines of this trivial meaningless new religion.

The weather must be stormy in Florida right now.

Manhattan’s district attorney has convened the grand jury that is expected to decide whether to indict former president Donald Trump, other executives at his company or the business itself should prosecutors present the panel with criminal charges, according to two people familiar with the development.

…

The move indicates that District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr.’s investigation of the former president and his business has reached an advanced stage after more than two years. It suggests, too, that Vance believes he has found evidence of a crime — if not by Trump then by someone potentially close to him or by his company.

Vance’s investigation is expansive, according to people familiar the probe and public disclosures made during related litigation. His investigators are scrutinizing Trump’s business practices before he was president, including whether the value of specific properties in the Trump Organization’s real estate portfolio were manipulated in a way that defrauded banks and insurance companies, and if any tax benefits were obtained illegally through unscrupulous asset valuation.

Any bets?

Michael Beschloss has been having fun with it.

Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on The pressure continues.

By “gender-affirming healthcare” he means puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and amputation of breasts or genitals. It’s at least debatable whether those items are healthcare at all.

TRA language games hide horrible nonsense behind a respectable veneer. There’s a difference between affirmative care and gender-affirmative “care”. The former is when the therapist affirms that the client/patient is, in fact, experiencing something. The latter is when the therapist affirms that the experience is veridical or that beliefs based on that experience are correct. Denying the patient’s phenomenological experience is unhelpful, while accepting it can build the trust required for progress.

Affirming the patient’s disordered belief structure, however, is not just unhelpful, it is bizarre and obviously so. In response to what other psychological condition can you imagine the suggested reaction would be affirmation? Pick a disorder at random and say, “Yes, …” Patient presenting with anorexia? Yes, you are a fat fatty. Grandiose delusional identity? Yes, you are the King of Spain. Agoraphobia? Yes, something terrible will happen if you go outside. Social anxiety? Yes, they’re all going to laugh at you. Depression? Yes, everything is terrible and terrible and will never get better, and so are you. Schizophrenia? Yes, the voices are real and you should do whatever they tell you. And so on and so forth.

Gender-affirmative healthcare is not healthcare at all. It solves nothing and instead feeds the disorder, perpetuates the illness, exacerbates the pain. In short, it is the opposite and antithesis of healthcare.

Hey it was just rough sex, rough open-air sex, don’t kink-shame.

A teenager who killed an underage schoolgirl after buying her drink and abandoning her at a city beauty spot on a winter’s night was jailed today.

Ewan Fulton bit Mhari O’Neill on her breast and throttled her before leaving her in an intoxicated state on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill where her body was found by a dog walker.

Kink-shaming. So he choked her, so he bit her on the breast – so what? She probably loved it! Or was too drunk to notice. It’s nobody else’s business what kinksters get up to in the privacy of their own – er, in the privacy of Calton Hill.

I’ve been to Calton Hill. I expect everyone who’s ever set foot in Edinburgh has. It’s this big lump in the middle of the city, from which you can get a great view. It’s not quite the same thing as a discreet hotel room, with heating and duvets and desk clerks who call the police if some guy tries to take a drunk 15-year-old to a room.

He knew it was freezing cold. He bought a large bottle of vodka before heading up the hill with her.

Mr Prentice said that pathologists had decided that on balance they considered that hypothermia, with intoxication, was the most probable mechanism of the Portobello High School pupil’s death.

Probably so. You pour half a large bottle of vodka down a 15-year-old’s throat and take most of her clothes off and choke her and then leave her there on a cold night, she’s likely to die of hypothermia.

Fulton, now aged 20, admitted killing Miss O’Neill, who died on December 7 or 8 in 2018, when he appeared at the High Court in Edinburgh today.

He took part in sexual activity with the schoolgirl and bit her breasts and compressed her neck and culpably and recklessly endangered her health and life and exposed her to risk of injury and death.

He provided her with alcohol which resulted in her becoming intoxicated and incapable of looking after herself.

Kink, though.

More on belligerent trans-promoter Doctor Jack Turban:

Jack Turban, insistent critic of Abigail Shrier’s book on transitioning of young girls, constantly claims puberty blockers are safe. He is paid by a firm that manufactures them.

Jack Turban, MD, fellow in child and adolescent psychiatry at Stanford University School of medicine, bills himself as an Allopathic & Osteopathic Physician. But he’s famous for his advocacy for certain positions regarding transgender medicine – for advocating for the ‘Gender Affirming Care for Trans and ‘gender-diverse’ youth’ as part of his work on ‘Pediatric Gender Identity’ and vigorously advocating for, and downplaying the risks of medical transition, while selling books on the same.

…

Suitably inflammatory and triggering, Turban’s shown himself to be quite willing to tag any questioning of the ‘affirmative’ model as ‘conversion therapy’ that will certainly lead to suicide and follows it up with smears of anyone questioning his rhetoric as ‘right wing bigots’ – that tried and tested strategy of any activist seeking to shut down conversation.

…

According to Open Payments Search Tool used to track payments made by drug and medical device companies to physicians and teaching hospitals, Jack Turban has received at least  $15,000 (US) from Arbor Pharmaceuticals, manufacturers of Triptodur™, (triptorelin) which, through extended release injectable suspension, has been shown to arrest or reverse the clinical signs of puberty, in cases of precocious puberty – the exact purpose Arbor advocates Triptodur for.

How interesting, and how very convenient. A physician insistently promoting the ‘benefits’ of puberty blockers, who repeatedly insists on their safety and who seemingly has endless amounts of time to attack, denigrate, and smear doctors who disagree, has at least a 15,000 USD incentive to sanitize and push a drug, paid directly by the manufacturers. 

Scary Doctor Jack Turban again.

Chase Strangio and Jack Turban are the ones causing harm.

Yes how dare they talk to radical feminists who don’t believe the new ideology of Magic Gender? How dare they not talk to Jack Turban instead of any feminists or women at all?

Also why does Jack Turban think 60 Minutes has to answer his questions? Why does he think he’s the boss of them?

By “gender-affirming healthcare” he means puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and amputation of breasts or genitals. It’s at least debatable whether those items are healthcare at all.

MTG is doing outrage theater again.

House Republican leaders have condemned incendiary remarks from GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene five days after she first publicly compared Capitol Hill mask rules to the Holocaust, amid a wave of criticism from Republican and conservative critics as well as Jewish groups aimed at the Georgia congresswoman and the party leaders’ silence.

I missed it; what did she say?

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during an interview on a conservative podcast this week, compared House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to continue to require members of the House to wear masks on the chamber floor to steps the Nazis took to control the Jewish population during the Holocaust.

Let’s think about that. Is the mask requirement a step leading to the systematic murder of all members of the House? No. Is it a step leading to the systematic murder of anyone? Anyone at all? No. Is it a step leading to society-wide ostracism and persecution of all members of the House? No. Of anyone? No.

She has her chain of reasoning though. She’s thought about it.

Greene, in a conversation with the Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody Real America’s Voice TV show “The Water Cooler,” attacked Pelosi and accused her of being a hypocrite for asking GOP members to prove they have all been vaccinated before allowing members to be in the House chamber without a mask.

“You know, we can look back at a time in history where people were told to wear a gold star, and they were definitely treated like second class citizens, so much so that they were put in trains and taken to gas chambers in Nazi Germany,” Greene said. “And this is exactly the type of abuse that Nancy Pelosi is talking about.”

Actually the extermination camps were in Poland, but never mind that – the point is – no, it really isn’t. That word “exactly”? It should be “not in any way.”

Back to today’s story.

“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling,” House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said in a statement five days after Greene’s original comments and after she made similar comparisons Tuesday. “Let me be clear: the House Republican Conference condemns this language.”

Nuh uh, says MTG.

On Tuesday, Greene continued to ramp up her rhetoric, tweeting once again her thoughts about vaccine requirements and the Holocaust.

“I never compared it to the Holocaust, only the discrimination against Jews in early Nazi years. Stop feeding into the left wing media attacks on me,” Greene tweeted. “Everyone should be concerned about the squads support for terrorists and discrimination against unvaxxed people. Why aren’t they?”

…

Earlier Tuesday, Republican and conservative critics drew special attention to House Republican leaders for their silence following Greene’s latest tweets.

Trump wing v Never Trump wing.

“A new comment by @mtgreenee sticking with the Nazi comparison. I’m sure Republican leadership hasn’t seen it yet, so wanted to alert @GOPLeader, @SteveScaliseGOP, and @EliseStefanik so they can hop into action,” tweeted Bill Kristol, director of Defending Democracy Together, a conservative advocacy group.

Maybe she’s there to make the rest of them look respectable.

Interesting – the Biden admin met with some secular groups.

Representatives of atheist and secular groups held their first meeting with White House officials last week, marking a willingness by the Biden administration to work with the growing networks of religiously unaffiliated Americans.

…

Leaders of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, the Secular Coalition for America, American Atheists, Center for Inquiry and Ex-Muslims of North America also attended the virtual gathering that included Josh Dickson, deputy director of the office, and program specialist Ben O’Dell.

…

Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF, welcomed the first meeting with the new administration.

“With more than a quarter of the population identifying as a ‘None’ (no religion), it’s vital that our community, our voices be heard in favor of reason in social policy and upholding our secular government,” she said in a statement.

I’m especially glad to see Muhammad Syed there. (“There” being the meeting, not a physical place, since rows of little windows aren’t a place.)

The Scottish Sun also reports on The Great Controversial Stickers Controversy.

POLICE Scotland faced anger and ridicule after a clampdown on stickers from a feminist group opposed to the relaxation of gender self-ID laws.

The national force was accused of a “chilling” attack on free speech after announcing it was probing the matter as a “hate” crime.

Officers in Kirkcaldy also urged members of the public to contact them or Fife Council if locals saw any more “controversial stickers”.

Without specifying the nature of the controversy.

The move came after cops were alerted to “Women won’t wheesht” stickers that had been placed on lampposts in Kirkcaldy, promoting activists For Women Scotland.

…

Following the backlash, Police Scotland deleted the tweet with a senior sources saying it was “poorly worded”.

Well it was, because of the failure to describe the stickers beyond the one word “controversial” while asking the public to report them all the same. It would have tied up all the phones and computers for years.

Police also denied its move was connected to the SNP’s new Hate Crime and Public Order Act – which became law last month.

The force said it had not yet been given new powers under the legislation, which sparked concerns about freedom of speech during its passage through Holyrood.

Great, so they’re going to be even worse.

SNP MP and feminist campaigner Joanna Cherry QC suggested the apparent clampdown on a women’s group could mean police risk unlawfully victimising women or people who believe that the gender self-ID push is wrong.

She said: “The onus is on Kirkcaldy police to explain why they were concerning themselves with stickers which they deemed controversial as opposed to criminal.

“The deletion of their tweet would indicate that they now accept this was not an appropriate use of police time.

“The police should be mindful that as a public authority they are bound by the Public Sector Equality Duty to foster good relations between all the protected characteristics under the Equality Act and not to discriminate, harass or victimise any person or group because of their protected characteristic.

“The protected characteristics include sex, sexual orientation and belief as well as gender reassignment.”

Got that???

The Times reports on the zealous policing in Scotland:

Marion Calder, spokeswoman for [For Women Scotland], said Millar had been overwhelmed by the support she had received.

“Marion still has no idea of what she is being accused of and won’t know until she attends the police station on Thursday,” she said. “This is exactly why we raised concerns about the new hate crime legislation.

“It was obvious that if complaints were made they would be followed through — no matter how vexatious or politically motivated. Serious questions have to be raised about how Police Scotland has handled this.

“The public are finally waking up and getting worried about what is happening to freedom of speech. Police Scotland appear determined to follow through complaints about women expressing views or posting stickers, yet we can see thousands of football supporters being able to congregate and vandalise a city centre with apparent impunity. It’s nonsensical.”

Nonsensical and repressive, sexist, bullying, and grotesquely unjust.

A spokeswoman for Police Scotland said: “We received two complaints regarding comments made on social media, enquiries into this are ongoing.”

How is it only two? If people are aware that Police Scotland react this way to two complaints, how is it that there aren’t 70 billion complaints?

And can Police Scotland not simply look at the “comments made on social media” and decide they’re not a police matter? Given that people post blood-dripping physical threats on Twitter all the damn time, I’m very skeptical that Marion’s tweets are in fact a police matter.

Police Scotland has been accused of a “chilling” attack on free speech after officers in Kirkcaldy urged people to contact them if they saw “controversial stickers” promoting For Women Scotland.

That’s not what they said though. They didn’t mention For Women Scotland. They didn’t mention anything, they just said “controversial stickers.” They said to let them know if we saw the stickers, without saying what they were.

It opposes plans which would allow individuals to self identify as women without medical checks, claiming this infringes on women’s rights. The stickers featured the hashtag #womensrightsarenotahatecrime.

But the police left all of that out of the tweet. All of it.

Russell Findlay, the Scottish Conservative shadow community safety minister, said: “It seems absurd but also chilling to issue a public warning about stickers.” Joanna Cherry QC, the SNP MP, said: “The deletion of their tweet would indicate this was not an appropriate use of police time.”

Or that they needed to include the relevant information, or both.

We should just elect cows and chickens and wombats to Congress, it would make more sense and be cheaper.

About those “femmes”…

If you have been on the internet recently, then you’ve likely seen the phrase “women and femmes” floating around. Maybe you read it in this article from Everyday Feminism concerning emotional labor or maybe in this takedown of white feminism from Wear Your Voice. You’ve almost certainly seen it pop up on your Twitter or Facebook feeds, at least if you’re someone who has links to queer and/or feminist communities. While it might seem innocuous, the phrase has been irritating me for the last two years or so. Why? Because it is, to put it lightly, incoherent nonsense.

…Femme is a term that comes from working-class lesbian culture. It was originally used to describe lesbians who were feminine in their appearance and clothing, and sat in opposition to butch lesbians, who were masculine in their appearance and clothing. (If you’re interested in reading more about the height of butch/femme culture then I suggest reading Leslie Feinberg’s seminal novel Stone Butch Blues.) Femme was about femininity released from the chains of obligation to men and their gazes. It was a defiant and knowing femininity, performed for oneself and for other women, rather than in service of the heteronormative status quo, which maintained that women were naturally feminine, men naturally masculine, and that the only acceptable desire was between these two kinds of people.

However, modern day usage of femme is far more expansive: Now it’s used throughout the queer community by people of any gender and sexuality as a label to name their intentional, feminine gender expression. (You can read a little more about how some queer people define their femme-ness in these pieces from Autostraddle and Vice.) It is important to recognize that people who are both straight and cisgender (i.e. not transgender) wouldn’t really claim a femme identity, since being feminine is not the same as being femme. For example, when cisgender straight women have a feminine gender expression it’s simply “the norm,” not an intentional reclamation of femininity from the clutches of heteronormativity. Femme is an identity that queer people choose—it is not simply a description of a person’s femininity.

In other words it’s for lesbians and…men who claim to be “queer.” In other other words it’s yet another word that’s been appropriated from women.

Someone should ask Stonewall “U ok hun?”

Chelsea Mitchell on what fun it was having to compete against two boys in her sport:

It’s February 2020. I’m crouched at the starting line of the high school girls’ 55-meter indoor race. This should be one of the best days of my life. I’m running in the state championship, and I’m ranked the fastest high school female in the 55-meter dash in the state. I should be feeling confident. I should know that I have a strong shot at winning.

Instead, all I can think about is how all my training, everything I’ve done to maximize my performance, might not be enough, simply because there’s a runner on the line with an enormous physical advantage: a male body.

I won that race, and I’m grateful. But time after time, I have lost. I’ve lost four women’s state championship titles, two all-New England awards, and numerous other spots on the podium to male runners. I was bumped to third place in the 55-meter dash in 2019, behind two male runners. With every loss, it gets harder and harder to try again.

That’s a devastating experience. It tells me that I’m not good enough; that my body isn’t good enough; and that no matter how hard I work, I am unlikely to succeed, because I’m a woman.

That’s why she filed a lawsuit along with three other women against the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC).

The CIAC allows biological males to compete in girls’ and women’s sports. As a result, two males began racing in girls’ track in 2017. In the 2017, 2018, and 2019 seasons alone, these males took 15 women’s state track championship titles (titles held in 2016 by nine different girls) and more than 85 opportunities to participate in higher level competitions that belonged to female track athletes.

Everybody used to know this was unfair.

But Connecticut officials are determined to ignore the obvious. And unfortunately, a federal district court recently dismissed our case. The court’s decision to do so tells women and girls that their feelings and opportunities don’t matter, and that they can’t expect anyone to stand up for their dignity and their rights.

…

It’s discouraging that the federal district court has decided that these experiences — these lost opportunities — simply don’t matter.But I’m not beaten yet. And neither are my fellow female athletes.

Through our ADF attorneys, my fellow athletes and I are appealing the federal district court’s ruling. We’re taking our case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, where we are going to ask once again for the court to recognize our right to fair competition — a right that Title IX has promised to girls and women for 50 years. And we’re fighting not just for ourselves, but for all female athletes.

Fingers crossed.